Starship Eternal (War Eternal Book 1) (34 page)

"My skin crawls thinking about being near him," Singh said. "I wouldn't ask it if it wasn't necessary to complete the mission."

Millie finally nodded. "Okay. Tell me when you need to start working on it, and we'll arrange for him to be brought up."

"I need him now," Singh said. "We'll need to work to mimic the transmission signatures. It might take hours. It also might take days."

"Can you get it done in time?" Millie asked.

"I hope so."

"What about the kill signal?" Mitchell asked. "If Watson is working on this, he won't be working on that."

"He can split time," Singh said. "Help me go in the right direction, and check my work."

 
"I'll send Shank to get him," Millie said.

"No. I'll do it," Mitchell said. He liked the Colonel, but he didn't trust him to bring Watson up without having some kind of accident that would leave him injured or worse. "Will we need a guard on engineering?"

"On any other Alliance ship, no. On this one?" She had weeded out the worst of them, and she had done a commendable job building them into an operational force that was able to work as a team. Even so, the Schism would always be a nuke on the verge of detonation.
 

"Have Cormac do it," Mitchell said. "If I tell him to leave Watson alone, he will. Have him come in partial exo."

"I thought I was in charge here?" Millie said, her tone more teasing than serious.
 

"Recommendation from your XO, Captain," Mitchell replied.

She smiled. "I concur. Go get Watson. I'll knock Cormac, and tell him to be discreet. I don't want Shank getting wind of this before I can speak to him privately."

"You don't trust him with Watson either?" Mitchell asked.

"Shank has a tendency to react to difficult situations by lashing out without thinking. It makes him an elite ground-pounder. It also makes him dangerous. I'd prefer to keep him as far away from Watson as possible." She fell silent while she communicated with Cormac through the ARR. Then she looked at him, a hint of stress and regret in her expression. "It's a bad habit of mine too, sometimes. I should have kept my mouth shut about Watson. I didn't realize how important he would turn out to be."

"We can't go backward," Mitchell said. "Let's just focus on keeping him in one piece."

"Yes, sir," Millie said, offering a mocking bow. "Go get him."

"Yes, ma'am," Mitchell replied, returning a serious bow before turning on his heel and heading out the door.

Mitchell was cautious as he navigated the halls of the Schism, checking each corridor and sneaking through it as though his goal was anything but sanctioned. He agreed with Millie that it would have been better if she hadn't spilled the secret of Watson's internment on the ship, but there was nothing to do about it now. Even the travelers couldn't move backward in time. Infinitely forward, never in reverse. The engineer was hated for a reason, a good reason. A reason Mitchell agreed with. He would rather have left the man to drift in space with Anderson.

Unfortunately, his abilities had become the most important asset they had. At least for the moment.

He made it to the lift without being seen, and then from the lift to the hanger. With Singh in engineering and Ilanka likely in the shower, he knew it would be deserted. He moved across it, past the S-17 and the Knight to a small storage room on the other side. The ore that had been mined for the Calypso mission was still resting there in the hold.
 

So was Watson.

They had provided him with a pisspot, a mattress, a chair, and a desk. They had also retrieved the equipment that he had built to eavesdrop on all of them from an empty compartment on E-Deck. It was where Anderson had likely vanished to whenever he wasn't with Millie, listening in on her private conversations with or without the engineer present. If she were right, he had also been getting himself off on her more intimate moments.

He had the small black box that served as the modulator dismantled on the desk, dozens of tiny wires snaking around one another. He held a tiny screwdriver more delicately than his meaty hands should have allowed, poking it into the box and making adjustments. It was easy to wonder if he was actually doing anything, and if he really intended to try to help them block the kill signal.
 

Mitchell had seen the look in Watson's eyes when he thought he was going to die. If he didn't do the work, they were all going to be blown into no more than space dust. Self-preservation was a powerful motivator.

"Captain Williams?" Watson said, looking up at him when he entered. He didn't look well. His grays were already stained with sweat, and his face and hair were oily. He smelled awful.
 

"How is the work coming?" Mitchell asked. He tried not to think about the man's past, and only see him as he was today. To stay neutral. It took effort, but he managed.

Watson held up the box. "This? It would be easier if I had a sample transmission to match the modulation against."

"You're only going to get one transmission." The one that would make the Schism explode.

"Yes, I know. I ran the calculations. The likelihood of successfully blocking the signal without a sample is about ten-thousand to one."

Mitchell drew in a sharp breath. "Those are lousy odds."

"Yes. I was going to tell the Captain, but I was afraid to bother her." He was afraid of Mitchell too, refusing to make eye contact, staring down at the box while he spoke. "Then I had another idea."

"Which is?"

"Block every signal. Anything that we don't use. I can bypass the ARR frequencies and the datalink bands, and intercept everything else."

"That sounds good."

"Yes. There's only one problem."

Of course, there was a catch. "How much of a problem?"

"That depends. The processing and power requirements to filter like this are going to be rather high. As you know, the Schism isn't equipped for massive power draws. Not the way a warship would be. I did a few calculations. We'll have to turn off-" He paused, looking at the surface of the desk where a screen full of numbers rested. "Almost everything. Including life support and gravity."

"That'll be fun. What about engines?"

"Of course, we need that."

"More than air?"

"The circulating air will remain at breathable levels for a couple of hours. Otherwise, we have enough hazard suits aboard for the crew. Anyway, once I can get a sample of the transmission, if we have some time I can adjust the modulator against it and fix the power concerns. Of course, you didn't know this before you came down, and you didn't bring me anything to eat. Why are you really here?"

"We need your help."

He shook his head. "I'm already helping you. Us."

"We need more help."

"Singh sent you down, didn't she? It's about the data?"

"How did you know?"

"We've been working together for the last three years, spending ten, fifteen hours in the same room. We know everything about each other."

"Everything?"

He kept his eyes on the box. "I didn't tell her about that. It was supposed to be a secret. I'm not stupid. I knew what people would think of me if they found out. I didn't mean to upset the Captain. I respect her too much, owe her too much for letting me stay on board when she knew what I had done. I only wanted to see if I could make the system work. It was Anderson who convinced me to let him use it. He said he could get me things through Ensign Hubble. Food, mostly. Delicacies from the New Terran worlds. I don't miss my people, but I do miss their food. He promised he wouldn't tell, and then he goes and blurts out things he wasn't supposed to know." He finally looked up. His eyes were moist. "I just want things to be the way they were. There's nobody here I'm a danger to. Why do you all have to hate me now?"

"There are some lines you just don't cross," Mitchell said. "Anderson was a rapist and a killer, and he didn't."

"I know I'm sick. I know my head is messed up. I can't help myself. I can't stop the thoughts, the urges, the desires. I-"

"Stop talking," Mitchell snapped. He didn't want to hear this. "You can pity yourself all you want, but nobody on this ship is going to pity you. If you want to go back to engineering, this is your chance."

Watson stopped talking for a few seconds. "Once I finish with the modulator. Once I finish helping Singh. What's to keep you from throwing me out of the airlock?"

"Nothing," Mitchell said. "It's the chance you'll have to take."

Watson shook the box in his hand. "How do you know I'll comply? How do you know I'll make this work?"

"That's the chance we have to take."

The engineer considered him for a moment. For all of his meekness over his sordid past, he seemed proud that he still held so much value to them. It was another great motivator.
 

"Okay, I'll do it," Watson said. "On one condition."

"I don't think you have much bargaining power here," Mitchell replied.

"I want to live. I don't care if I have to stay down here for the rest of my life. I'm terrified to die."

"I'll see what I can do."

"Please, Captain. Millie will listen to you. I know she will."

"I told you, I'll see what I can do. I'll talk to her. That's the only promise you're going to get. Are you in?"

 
He got to his feet, putting the modulator down on the table.
 

"Riigg-aaah," he said with a weak smile.

"Is the crew ready for this?" Millie asked, her voice echoing in Mitchell's head.

"We had four briefings, and they aced the drills," he replied.
 

"You know there's a big difference between a simulation and the real thing."

"They'll do fine. This is your crew." It was an easy compliment to boost her confidence.

"Thanks," she said.

The channel closed, leaving Mitchell alone in the cockpit of the S-17. He checked his p-rat for the time. They were only minutes away from dropping out of FTL, stepping from the safety of hyperspace to... what? They didn't know. They couldn't know. They had done their best to prepare for the worst. He could only hope that they had done enough.

Watson and Singh were certain their hack would work to punch through the security of the Alliance military databanks, using a vulnerability in some minor subsystem or other to sneak into their classified archives through a tiny back door. Once they had broken in, Singh would inject an algorithm that had a very simple, targeted purpose: download the results of a query on two names: Major Katherine Asher and Major Christine Arapo.

Once the data was aboard, the Schism's mission would be complete, and she would get the hell out of there. Mitchell, on the other hand, would do his best to locate Christine and try to send a message to her through her ARR, the same way M had used the helmet to send a message to him. If he were successful, he would hopefully meet her on the ground and take her away, using the fighter's FTL engine to rendezvous with the Schism. If he weren't, they would have to pray the data they collected would give them something they could use.

Then there was the other possibility. The one that had hung in the back of their minds and remained as an unspoken fear right up until they had briefed the crew on everything they knew about the travelers, and why they had made the decision to break orders and head for Liberty. It was Cormac, of course, who posed the question:
 

"What if the aliens get to Liberty before we do?"

Millie, Mitchell, and Singh had all fumbled for an answer. Shank had been blunt. "Then we're going to die. Now shut up, Firedog."

They were probably going to die anyway. If Nova-12 had been a suicide mission, this one was even crazier. They couldn't be certain who their enemy was going to be, but right now everyone was their enemy. Did it matter if they were assaulted by a massive blue ball of energy or a round of more conventional projectiles?
 

It was worse than that. In order to prevent the Alliance from blowing the Schism, the moment they dropped from FTL they would need to activate Watson's rig. That meant shutting down major systems to power the re-purposed CPUs from their own databanks to catch, process, and cancel signals across a band of over a million channels. Those systems weren't just life support and gravity. Shields were included in that, too. So were the long range sensors.